Metal Storm Awards 2017

Welcome to the annual Spend All Your Votes in Four Seconds and Then Bitch About How We Got the Nominees All Wrong - or, as we call it in the traditional manner, the Metal Storm Awards. Back by popular demand and because we have nothing else to do, the MSAs once again compile the strongest, loudest, heaviest, deepest, darkest, blackest, djentiest, proggiest, all-other-genres-iest releases from the past year in the interest of serving the public convenience and necessity. 2017's edition fiddles with the old numbers a bit; some categories are back up to ten nominees from five, some have dropped down again, but said fiddling has been purely in the interest of giving you the strongest selection of nominees to choose from.

If all this talk of fiddling has piqued your interest, we have a lovely selection of albums awaiting discovery in the Folk/Pagan/Viking region. If you're not much of a fiddler and prefer screwing around, we're sure you'll like our Industrial/Cyber/Electronic category. Or maybe you're more of a monkey wrench person, in which case Avant-Garde/Experimental is right over there somewhere. Perhaps you don't find any of this amusing. Well, Progressive is down the hall on the left, Your Majesty, and don't let the door hit you on the way out.

Awkward punning aside, we're proud of the roster we have set up this year, whatever the genre. Last year's Awards embroiled nearly all of our melodeath heavyweights in a fierce battle for supremacy, so with all of them out of the way in 2017, it looks like the melodeath category might actually get to experience some genuine competition from more unknown artists for once (just kidding; someone's still around to sweep it up, and you'll know who it is once you get there). The aforementioned Folk category this year gathers disparate artists from such far-flung locales as Germany, England, Germany, Norway, Germany, England, and some other, less important countries to display a veritable treasure trove of colorful talents and multifarious styles. We actually had an eight-way tie for the last nomination in Alternative, which, firstly, we hope you'll think is impressive, but also ought to suggest something about the quality of releases last year. And, as Oscar Wilde once famously expressed in Lady Windermere's Fan, "2017 was a kickass year for death metal."

We entreat you as we do every year to take your time with each category: listen to bands you've never heard before, give new albums a chance even if you don't know or don't even like the band, spend more than 0.003 seconds deliberating before casting a vote for the one name you recognize in a category. Who knows why we say that, because no one listens, but we're obliged to express these sentiments - because that is, after all, the attitude with which we in the Metal Storm Towers construct the Awards each year. In the end, the winners and losers will be forgotten, but if you discover a band you really love thanks to these Awards, that will stick with you for ages - and that's all we can hope for. It's not about numbers and titles; it's about finding cool music, sharing it with fellow metal fans, and having a good time.

Now that the sappy part is over, get votin', you rascals. And sound off about what we did right, what we did wrong and what we missed here.